


He who was living is now dead.

by treelines (horchata)



Category: Twilight - Meyer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Suicide Attempt, Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-09 16:36:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horchata/pseuds/treelines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isabella Swan wakes up on her wedding day cold (as usual), well-rested (as expected), and alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He who was living is now dead.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Adale](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Adale).



> This story was originally written for the 2007 Yuletide challenge for Adale. Only minor edits have been made since its original publication. Since 2007 (when _Eclipse_, the third book in the series, was published), this story has been majorly Jossed by later events in the Twilight canon, so please keep that in mind. Thank you to the Twilight Lexicon, and to T. S. Elliot, who is always good for a few random lines.
> 
> For the uninitiated, like myself: In the second book of the series, after Edward leaves her in an attempt to keep her safe from vampiric politics, Bella Swan spends time courting danger and death, because she finds she can hear Edward's voice when her adrenaline level is high. The more dangerous the situation, the louder his voice. 
> 
> There are possible self-harm triggers in this story. Please use care.

>   
>  _"Bella, you are utterly absurd."_   
> 

 

**i. a little life with dried tubers**

 

Isabella Swan wakes up on her wedding day cold (as usual), well-rested (as expected), and alone.

Her bed is empty. The house is empty. Her feet make hollow thumping noises along the wooden floor, dulled by the carpet when she gets there, slapping noises on the linoleum. She recognizes she is in too much shock to register panic. She doesn't try to open her mouth to start yelling for fear she'll sound stupid or not be able to stop.

He's left her. They have all left her.

She walks out of the door and down the street and onto the highway and into a semi-truck carrying lumber. The bones in her spine, her kneecaps, her skull, shatter like chalk.

She doesn't hear anyone telling her no.

She also does not die.

 

//

 

(The pills don't kill her either. The knives, the hanging -- that was awkward, the high cliff-falls, the crying until her eyes were swollen and her throat hurt like a bitch. Charlie manages to find her and take her to a psychiatrist. They give her Lexapro and then Cymbalta and one-hour therapy sessions for the rest of the summer. Bella slits her wrists and bleeds and bleeds and bleeds but never dies. No one picks up the phone at the other end of her Bella-Edward suicide hotline. She hates her body, now. She starves it and there is no thick-voiced undead conscience in her head to tell her no. Only Charlie with his lukewarm fingers tentatively reaching out, her childhood nickname _Bells, bells, bells _ringing in her ear.)

 

//

 

Later, Bella goes out to their meadow and sits. It is cold during the day and during the night, and she watches as small bits of dew collect on the fine hairs of her arm. She thinks about what things were like when they first started dating, when she first fell in love with Edward. He kept insisting he was dangerous and she didn't care. He told her that it was better for them to be just friends, then, to not be friends at all. These things collect in her mind and in her palms, one holding the crystal charm he gave her, one holding nothing but air.

In the soft afternoon on the second day, the marine layer finally lets go of the sky, giving in to the warming earth to let a few weak beams of sunlight filter through. Bella's skin is dull and clammy under the yellowing light. Charlie finds her like that, unremarkable and hypothermic in the meadow, the charm a weight in her pocket.

Somehow Bella ends up at Dartmouth. She doesn't really remember much of that.

 

 

**ii. more pretention**

_You should know what you're getting into, _he had said.

Bella had been on the couch, Edward on his knees before her. He'd licked up her thighs, traced the undercurve of her pale breasts, had flushed them pink and dark and full. He had been cold, and her skin had prickled, shivered, stretched. It was different than doing it herself with fingers at all the wrong angles; it was like she was in a long slow rise, trying to -- catching something that was fast and hot and -- she had felt herself clutch at his hair and his forearm and

and then she had

(_This won't ever happen again,_ he said, halfway through. _Your blood will never warm._

(_Oh, _Bella breathed.)

 

 

**iii. my people humble people who expect / nothing.**

Bells is in college, and she is older. She is beginning to acquire history. Its touch along her collarbone is deft and loving. She is constantly pleasantly surprised.

"You're shitting me, Jingle. You're still a virgin?"

She (once '_Bella_', still 'Bells', now sometimes 'Jingle' to her dormmates in Dartmouth) smirks; offers her palms, her wrist, her raised shoulders. She gestures vaguely from her place on her back on the carpet. "What can I say? I am a delicate unpicked flower."

Greg snickers from the beer pong table. She never wins, and so she never plays. She prefers her vodka and her shot glasses. "You are a venus fly trap."

She salutes his fine observation from the floor from where she guards their beer -- she is queen of the floor at every party, lying flat along the lowest plane possible -- with another jello shot. (She never chokes. She cannot die.) It's funny, kind of. She is a carnivorous plant! She eats little men like bugs! (She is so, so very drunk.)

Greg sinks a glass and his new jock friend re-racks the cups. "Sure like to know what you did to keep that kind of commodity."

"Pass up a cold one, Jingle?" the jock asks separately, and as soon as it hits her Bells lets her head roll back and laughs and laughs.

(Outside the wind howls.)

 

**iv.'That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / 'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?**

Bells could care less about her Gothic Romance class. She watches _Buffy_ on her laptop in the back and starts taking notes on the dialogue, the mythology. The irony is hilarious to her, until it isn't. She changes to a Sociology major and throws her copy of _Dracula_ away.

She is learning about the world, realizing how she became so selfish and self-absorbed. She's embarrassed by her past. She remembers her annoyance when Charlie asked her to keep the television volume down in the hotel while he moved her into Dartmouth. She had never thought of the people next door before. There were reasons why.

 

**v. he, the young man carbuncular, arrives**

Bells wakes up another Ivy League morning (another Ivy League hangover) and sees Jacob Black alert in the chair by her bed.

"You're nineteen," he says. "I've missed you. Let's do something."

_Fuck off_, she thinks, _Where have you been?_ she thinks, _You are still so warm,_ Bella thinks, and then follows him outdoors.

 

 

**vi. white bodies naked on the low damp ground**

Jake laughs at Sagittarius, takes a longer drag on the joint. "They smell like pot. Vampires. I didn't know until I went over to Spokane. But that's what they're most like: _mare-eh-huana_."

His grin stretches something low in her belly and she can feel his laugh vibrate in her chest. Bella rolls over onto her stomach, onto his stomach. She crawls up his warm, warm body and straddles his navel. Her hands tear up errant blades of grass from in the wet earth on either side of his cheekbones, and she drops the scraps on his face before taking a hit and blowing them off.

Jake took his motorcycle east along I-90 for her, once the Quileutes had determined beyond a doubt that both she and the vampires had completely disappeared. He did not go to see her family, knowing she was in trouble and giving Charlie (Alpha male) his distance. It was unlike Jake to stay too far away for long, but she recognized the respect in the gesture. She recognized the life (his hope) in his coming.

"What are these scars from?" she asks, tracing a finger down the side of his neck.

He is quiet, though his body thrums underneath hers. She sits her hips back onto his jeans, hands steadying herself on his chest, lifts an eyebrow. His big, big hands rise to lay along her ribs. He sits up, serious. "You don't think we only deal with vampires."

"I didn't think the SATs had that much bite?"

Jake laughs and licks his teeth, nudges her nose with his. She can tell he thinks there's something important to say. She hates it. "You should know what you're getting into," he says.

"God, shut up," she says, and bites his lip. Below her, the earth hardens.

 

** (HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME) **

In the summer, Jacob will take her south and east to Bremerton, this old rusting shipyard in the midst of a blackberry festival. He will grin when she savors the sharp twisting tang of the berries, how they seem to roll in her mouth. It will be the end of August, and Bella's bones will say it will rain soon, despite the yellowing light. His hand on her back will be warm warm warm, and Bella will taste the salt air, and the berries, and then his mouth on hers.

She will ignore the heavy crystal in her pocket, how there is something in the air that softly says _no_.


End file.
